How to write metered verse
by George J. Dance This article is about writing metered verse in English, meaning traditional or formal accentual-syllabic verse. Its examples deal with writing in only 1 meter: iambic pentameter, the most commonly used meter in English. Once a writer is used to writing in a meter, it is relatively easy to apply the same knowledge to using different meters. (Readers are advised to look at the article on Meter to see just how many different meters there can be.) Rhythm and meter The poet writing in accentual-syllabic verse must concern himself with two patterns of accented or stressed syllables, imposed by two different logics: the logic of the words and their stress patterns in the language (the "rhythm"); and the logic of the feet and their stress pattern in the meter. When the poet arranges the syllables of his line so that the rhythm and the meter coincide, the result is euphony, which can give a sense of rightness, or completeness, or a feeling of 'heightened speech.' When the two patterns do not match, the result can be discordant, distracting, and even ridiculous. So a poet wishing to write metered verse well must be familiar with both the stress patterns of the meter he is using, and the stress patterns of the words as naturally used in the language. For nouns, action verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, stress is based on the importance of the syllable to the word's etymology. For these types of words, the rules are: #Single-syllable nouns, action verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are always stressed. #Bi-syllabic (2-syllable) non-compound nouns, action verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are almost always stressed at the root; that is, prefixes or suffixes are not stressed. (Watch out for exceptions, where pronunciation of a word has changed; for example "detail" and "depot.") #Multi-syllabic nouns, action verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are again almost always stressed at the root. Prefixes and suffixes or their constituent parts, however, may (also) be stressed if there is an unstressed syllable between them, the stressed root, and the next stressed syllable on either side."Basic English Prosody," Strong Verse, Mar. 10, 2008, Blogspot, Web, July 31, 2011. (Again, watch out for exceptions, like "deficit" and to some "defecate.") The above rules also help determine the stress pattern for other parts of speech (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and linking verbs), in which stress is partly determined by a syllable's relation to other stressed syllables: #Single-syllable pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and linking verbs are never stressed if they appear next to a single-syllable noun, action verb, adjective, or adverb either side #Single-syllable pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and linking verbs are never stressed if they appear next to a stressed part of a multi-syllabic noun, action verb, adjective, or adverb either side #Single-syllable pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and linking verbs are always stressed if there is an unstressed syllable between them and the next stressed syllable both sides. #As they are infrequently in between two unstressed syllables, articles are never stressed. Even if they do fall between unstressed syllables ... the effect is more of creating a pyrrhic foot than an actual stress. To which we should add, for completeness: #Bisyllabic or multisyllabic pronouns (himself), prepositions (over, above), and conjunctions (although) obey the same stress rules as bisyllabic or multisyllabic nouns, action verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The poet must arrange his words and sentences so that their natural stress pattern, or rhythm, coincides with the meter he has chosen to use. When writing strict iambic pentameter, for example, he must ensure that every second syllable is stressed. Varying the meter A stanza of verse consisting of nothing but rows of 10 exactly iambic feet -- composed "in sequence of a metronome", to use the famous phrase from the Imagist manifestoEzra Pound, "In Retrospect," Literary Essays of Exra Pound (New Directions, 1968), 2, Google Books, Web, July 31, 2011. -- could be boring, and could sound artificial. In fact, there are many permissible metrical variations allowed. These variations help to give a verse its individual character. Variations should be used sparingly. Precisely because they are exceptions to the meter, they stand out and get noticed. My own recommendation is that a poet use a variation only in the case of a phrase or expression that he cannot say equally well in regular meter -- because just such a phrase is likely to be one to which he would want to draw attention anyway. There are two types of permissible variations: substituting feet, and adding or subtracting syllables at the beginning or ending of a line: Adding and subtracting syllables Normal addition and subtraction variations include: #A line can be made headless or acephalic by omitting its first syllable. The effect of this in iambic verse is to start the line with a stressed syllable, which makes the word containing that first syllable more prominent -- especially if one is also using majusculation (capitalizing the first letters of lines). #A line can be made catalectic by omitting its last syllable. This is rarely done in iambic verse, since it means cutting a stressed syllable. Catalexis is more commonly used in trochaic verse, since (as with headless iambic verse), the effect is to both start and end one's lines with stressed syllables. #More commonly, in iambic verse, a line can be made hypercatalectic by adding an extra syllable at its end. This is most commonly used, when writing iambic verse, in the case of line endings with feminine rhymes. The resulting eleven-syllable line is called a hendecasyllable. Hendecasyllabic verse is the most common verse form used in Italian, a language that has many feminine endings -- for that reason, hypercatalexis is often used in English when writing Italian or Petrarchan sonnets. Substituting feet Normal substitution variations include: #A trochee can be substituted for an iamb in a foot provided that the foot immediately follows a break (either a line or stanza break, or a caesura ), and is in turn followed by a regular iamb. As the resulting four-syllable combination (DUM-da-da-'DUM') corresponds to the foot of classic meter called the choriamb; this form of substitution can be called either trochaic substitution, trochaic inversion (since the syllables of the first foot are inverted), or choriambic substitution. It is the most common form of substitution.'. #A pyrrhic foot (two unstressed syllables) or a spondee can always be substituted for an iamb. A common variant ot this is a spondaic foot following a pyrrhic one (da-da'''-DUM-DUM') which is equivalent to the classical foot known as the double iamb #Three-syllable feet (most commonly anapests), can be substituted for iambic feet. Essentially iambic verse with frequent subsitutions is called ''loose iambic' meter. The longer the line (that is, the more feet it contains), the more substitutions that are allowed. A good rule of thumb to follow is that the defining foot -- in this case, the iamb -- should always make up the majority of feet in every line; meaning, in the case of iambic pentameter, that substitutions of any kind are "generally not done more than twice in one line:" Larger units In addition to balancing the syllables and stress patterns of his poem's words and feet, the poet also has to pay attention to larger units both linguistic (phrases, clauses, and sentences, indicated by punctuation) and metrical (lines and stanzas). When both units end together, and line and punctuation break coincide, the result (called an end-stopped line) can give the line's words a sense of completeness or closure; When one ends and the other does not -- when a grammatical unit ends in the middle of a line (called a '''caesura) or continues past the end of a line (called a run-on or [[Enjambment|'enjambed']] line) -- the result is a subliminal tension. See also * Verse * Verse forms References External links * Poetry Meter, Creative Writing Now. Category:How-to articles Category:George Dance articles